


Sleep

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Gen, all series long
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:59:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John can sleep. Sherlock can't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Before

John can sleep.

He lies in bed every night at ten forty-seven exactly, teeth brushed and hair washed and a cup of tea on his bedside table. He lies in bed at ten forty-seven under his beige sheets and counts the watermarks on the beige ceiling, and knows that he can sleep.

He used to do this in the army, actually. His sheets were beige there, too.

John can sleep, and when he sleeps he dreams of sand and sun and gunfire, and sometimes he stays, in that desert under the white-hot sun with his precious gun and his medical kit. Sometimes he stays, and watches the beige sand turn red, and somehow he never, ever misses home.

Sometimes he stays, and sometimes he wakes, heart pounding. _It’s just a dream,_ he tells himself then. _It was only a dream,_ and some nights he feels relief, and some nights he feels loss, and other nights he wants to go out and buy paint and splash the ceiling crimson.

His landlord would kill him, he knows, so he doesn’t. He just lies back down and stares with wide-open eyes at the beige, and it hurts more than the gunshot did. Some nights.

Some nights when he comes back he gets up and limps over to his desk and just sits and strokes his gun, thumbs the cool solid metal until his hand stops shaking. Sometimes he doesn’t even need the cane, but only sometimes. And other nights he stays in bed and sips his cold tea, closes his eyes, takes deep breaths until everything inside his head is a bed-sit beige and not a sand-and-blood beige, and he feels less like a soldier and more like a man.

What he never does is go back to the desert, back to his dreams. It would hurt too much. It doesn’t actually matter whether he woke up relieved to be home, to be alive, or if he woke up smelling the sand and sun and hating this safe city and every quiet, peaceful thing in it. It hurts the same, all the time, so he just sits and sips his tea or strokes his gun, and he doesn’t sleep.

John can sleep, he knows. He just doesn’t try.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

It’s not the flat. His flat is…. Well, alright, it’s not ideal. The carpet hasn’t been cleaned in something like four years and five months, going by the shade of the coffee stains next to the sofa, and the wallpaper is insipid and _boring_. There’s a chemical smell coming from the bathroom and there may or may not be rotting ears in the fridge that would account for the scent of decomposition that wafts up from the kitchen. Sherlock can’t tell, he deleted the experiment. He thinks. And he can’t really be bothered to check.

But it’s not the flat that’s keeping him awake. There’s nothing very wrong with the flat, and anyway Sherlock figures he’s beyond that kind of silly attachment. No reason to complain about the flat, even if it _is_ insipid and disgusting, even if the landlord is an idiot who complains about the state of fridges that don't even hold his food and yet refuses to fix the cracks on the stair. The flat is fine, it’s just housing for the transport, anyway, and it’s much better than a skip.

Funnily enough, Sherlock always slept fine in the skips. But that was probably something else.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and he doesn’t know why. The not knowing why bit bothers him rather a lot more than the not sleeping bit. Not sleeping, he can handle. He has plenty in his brain to occupy him at nights, anyway, and he’s never been particularly fond of his subconscious. It’s too _emotional_ , and not nearly rational enough, and he hates that his worlds never make any sense and the moment he starts to understand them, he wakes up and they weren’t even real anyway, and were therefore not important or worth figuring out. He hasn’t been back there in weeks. His body might mind, he thinks, but _he_ doesn’t. Not particularly.

But it annoys him that he doesn’t understand it. It annoys him whenever he doesn’t understand _anything_ , of course, but this feels different. More… personal. He should know himself, he thinks, it’s his _right_.

Lestrade is always telling him that he’s an entitled bastard. Sherlock always ignores him, but he remembers.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and it’s not because he’s busy and it’s not because he’s bored. Sherlock can’t sleep, and it’s because he always feels like he’s _missing_ something, something _important_ , and it’s not logical and it makes no sense and he hates the feeling that he’s incomplete, so he deletes the thought, over and over again. He plays the violin until his landlord nearly kicks him out twice, and he almost blows up the stove pouring hydrochloric acid on sodium on his third consecutive sleepless night, and he writes papers and wishes he could shoot the wall and, alright, maybe he _does_ smoke a cigarette, but just the one, honestly. It doesn’t help. He doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t understand why, and that feeling just won’t be deleted and it won’t sit quietly in his recycling bin even though he actually created a mental lid for it.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and it bothers him more than it should.


	2. Battlefield

John can sleep.

It's actually fairly surprising.

 _You did just kill a man_ , Sherlock had said, and he had peered at John like John was some kind of alien creature, some crazy man who could shoot through windows and fell serial killers without even blinking. _He wasn’t a very nice man_ , John had replied, because it was true, and Sherlock had smiled, then, and laughed, and they had gone out for spring rolls and prawn dumplings and Sherlock had helped him wash the gunpowder off his hands and he never looked at John like that again, not for the whole night, and it was fine.

John still hadn’t expected to be able to sleep. He _had_ just killed a man.

He wonders, as he slips into the sand, what kind of a man it makes him that he can shoot a killer and feel no remorse, just to save the life of a man he’s only just met. That he can go out for Chinese with that man and giggle over the fortune cookies and move in together when he’s still paying rent for that dreadful beige room that’s holding all his stuff. He wonders what kind of a man it makes him that he can go to bed at two in the morning without his cup of tea and not think about anything other than the lovely patterned wallpaper and how not-beige it is, and slip into dreams of war with a feeling of _home_.

John can sleep, and it ought to scare him to death, and it doesn't, and that’s worse.

He wakes up at around four to a still-dark sky and a pale blue ceiling, the sound of gunshots still ringing in his ears. _Not a very nice man_ , he says to himself, but that’s really not the problem.

He starts to pull himself out of bed even though he doesn’t want to go. He’s tired and it’s been a long day, and he hasn’t had a proper rest in months, and this bed is much nicer than his old beige one or his little army cot. But now he’s woken up, and he can’t go back, can’t even decide if he wants to. John knows this, and he rolls back his blanket, and starts to get up.

John starts to get up, but he stops.

He doesn’t know why, at first. He just stops, one foot on the ground, blanket folded down to his waist, listening, watching, soldier’s senses on high alert. Then he gets it, or he hears it. A note, a little snatch of music, drawn long and bright and sharp in the darkness.

It’s a cry, plaintive and sad and beautiful, and it comforts him.

John is exhausted, he knows, but now he feels it, sleep pulling on the edges of his consciousness, black and heavy. The note stretches, wavers, stops. A new one follow it, slow and strong, John listens, and feels himself falling, and before he knows it he’s back on his pillow with his blanket tucked up to his shoulders. His eyes close, and he dreams.

He doesn’t dream of sand, which is another surprise. He dreams of wet streets and fire  
escapes, of city lights blinking in the dark like stars and the gun in the waistband of his jeans. He dreams of running after a billowing black coat, chest throbbing and legs aching and _grinning_ , and of a safe and quiet battlefield, and in the background he can hear a violin.

John can sleep. He sleeps just fine.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

It’s still not the flat.

His brain is working, still, tying the final threads together, putting in the final pieces of the puzzle, filling in his mental case notes to store away. Jeff Hope, the cabbie. Poisoned pills, an aneurysm, kids who will never see their father again –

No, not a good thought. He deletes it with more force than is strictly necessary.

A fake gun and a black London cab, and a name that no one ever says. Moriarty. Moriarty, with his (or hers or its) sponsorship program, with his (or her or its) fascination with him. Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock thinks these things, catalogues them, writes them down on little mental cue cards and slots them into a cabinet where he won’t ever forget them, not ever. When he’s done, he leans back on the sofa, feet hanging off the armrest, and closes his eyes.

He still can’t sleep.

It’s aggravating.

Sherlock doesn’t understand it, still doesn’t, and it’s driving him mad. He knows that, logically, the end of a case is the perfect time to get some rest. No boredom, but no puzzles to solve, no reason to stay awake. Usually, after cases, Sherlock sleeps perfectly.

He doesn’t, tonight. Obviously.

Maybe it’s the case.

He pulls the cards out of the cabinet and looks at them, really looks, but there’s nothing there that’s too much out of the ordinary. Yes, alright, there _was_ the fact that he could have died, had he picked the wrong pill (he hadn’t), but he’d faced that kind of danger before, and it didn’t scare him, and there was nothing –

John’s bed creaks. Sherlock hears it, and thinks, _oh_.

A killer. Two pills, a choice, a gamble. And then –

A gunshot, through two windows, killing the killer, saving him, even if he didn’t really want to be saved. A marksman, guarding his back. _John_.

Sherlock understands, now.

John’s bed creaks, again, then stops creaking. There is a thump on the ceiling, like a foot striking the carpet. _Nightmares_ , Sherlock thinks, and it feels unacceptable, that someone as not-quite-stupid as John Watson should have to have nightmares, and not sleep. Sherlock imagines John getting out of bed, sitting through the night, unable to sleep and knowing exactly why, and it hurts in a way he can’t explain.

He pulls out his violin almost without thinking, and plays a note.

There is a rustle, then the bed creaks again, and then nothing. Sherlock smiles, and keeps playing. He feels it again, for a moment, that feeling of _missing something_ , and then it goes, running through his fingers and out the tip of his bow and bleeds into every note, vanishing into the night.

Sherlock can’t sleep, but then maybe he can.

At dawn, he puts away his violin and goes to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were wondering, the song that Sherlock plays for John is Rememberances, by John Williams.
> 
> Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPif8xl_13s


	3. Blame

John can sleep.

Well. “Can” is an understatement.

He doesn’t even bother to shower or change, just kicks off his shoes and flops down on the bed. His clothes will crumple, he knows, and the little army captain in his brain starts to protest almost immediately, but John hasn’t had a proper night of sleep in three days and he’s been tied up and knocked out and almost seen his boss and (ex?)girlfriend shot with a bloody _crossbow_ on their first date, which, you know, kind of takes it out of a person. He figures he’s just too tired to care.

John can sleep. It’s kind of inevitable.

John rolls into bed, too tired to think, and doesn’t think about being near death, doesn’t think about fear, doesn’t think about Chinese gangsters with a secret code and an interesting selection of ridiculously camp death traps. He doesn’t think about guilt, the guilt of seeing Sarah hurt because of him, the guilt of letting Soo Lin die because he didn’t care enough to stay with her.

John doesn’t think about these things. He dreams about them.

It’s night, in his dream, black sky dotted with diamond stars over eerie silver sand. It’s his desert, he knows it is, but there is no burning sun, no bits of scrub grass poking out of the dunes, no other men, no trenches, no smell of blood. There is gunfire, but it’s far away, carried to him by the paint-scented wind, mixed with the sound of a gong and London traffic.

John’s feet have sunken into the silvery sand, and he drags them through, trudging towards something in the distance that he can’t yet see. The sand twists, and suddenly he is trudging through books, a desert of words. The dune ahead of him is printed with the third page of _The Old Man and The Sea_ , and the one on his right looks oddly like the “G” section of the Oxford English Dictionary. The sand he’s walking through is unmistakably the London A-Z, and right at his feet there’s a yellow line, a lurid neon spray.

“John”, says a voice, and Sarah’s standing next to him, knee-deep into the sand. She’s sinking, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “John, I’ve taken another of your patients for you. I’d just like to mention that sleeping on your shift is highly unprofessional.”

“Have you seen my camera-phone?” his dream-self asks, completely nonchalant.

“No,” says Sarah, conversationally. She’s waist-deep into the sand now, and shouldn’t they both be more concerned? John doesn’t know. His dream-self shuffles his feet a bit, but the sand he’s standing in is mostly solid. Sarah keeps sinking.

“It’s your fault, you know,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It’s your fault I’m sinking. You brought me here.”

It’s probably true, John knows. It _is_ his desert.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know you’d fall in.”

Sarah shrugs. Her shoulders go under.

“I can hear Sherlock,” she says. “He’s somewhere up ahead.”

John looks, and he can hear him too.

“You’ll leave me, won’t you,” she says, somewhat sadly, and it isn’t a question. “Leave me here, go after him.”

“No, I, ah,” says dream-John. “Yes. Bolt the door after me.”

He takes off. There is no door to bolt, but he leaves anyway. Sarah keeps sinking. John doesn’t look back.

John runs. John dreams.

John sleeps, and doesn’t wake once.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

John is asleep, upstairs, he knows. The flat is quiet. The street buzzes down below, just outside the window, pulsing, alive, beautiful.

Sherlock paces, stares out the window, peels off his nicotine patches and flings them in the fire. He goes to bed, gets up again, flops down on the couch, stands back up. Reaches for his violin, but no, that would wake John, puts it back.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and it isn’t the flat, and it isn’t John, and he wants to tear his hair out and scream, _what now??_

He looks out the window again. Light glints off the glass, catches the yellow paint and makes it glow neon bright. Sherlock shudders, just a little bit.

 _John’s alright_ , he thinks, he tells himself. _John’s fine, his friend’s fine, he doesn’t blame you, go to sleep._

It helps, but not enough.

Images flash before his eyes, dancing in the flecks of light from the street lamps. Book codes, crossbows, neon paint. Catching hundred-year old teapots and yelling at thugs to leave ancient skulls alone. Coming into the restoration room and seeing Soo Lin Yao, on the ground, where just a moment before they’d been talking.

Artifacts, he can save. Living, breathing people, not so much.

Sherlock thinks about all the dead bodies he’s seen in his career. There have been so many. Shot, strangled, stabbed, cut up. He’d brought them home, dissected them, left them to rot. Peered at them at crime scenes and read their entire lives. Sherlock thinks of all these bodies, and he doesn’t feel a thing besides fascination, maybe satisfaction.

He should feel bad, but he doesn’t. Those bodies weren’t people, they were cases, experiments.

Soo Lin was a person. Had been a person. Sherlock had talked with her, had caught a teapot for her, had not been able to protect her. She had been a person, and he had failed, and now she all she was was  another specimen in Molly’s morgue.

Sherlock closes his eyes. Thinks. _Experiment_ , he thinks, _think of her as another experiment_.

Experiments teach him something, they always do. What had he learned from her?

He was brilliant with the dead. He was useless with the living.

Not a great lesson.

A case, then. A piece in a case. That was better. She was a player in a case that he had solved, no more of a person than any other victim, any other witness, any other gun thrown in the Thames. She had been a piece in the puzzle, and she was gone but the case was solved, and that is all that matters.

Sherlock says this to himself, over and over, until he can believe it. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth and a flat weight in his stomach, it works, takes away the sting.

 _Wrong_ , he thinks, _wrong wrong wrong_.

He’ll have to get used to it, he thinks. It’s useful, not caring.

Sherlock still can’t sleep. He gets a sponge and scrubs at the window until the last fleck of paint is gone, then he sits and doesn’t care until the sun begins to rise.


	4. Breathing

John can sleep.

He thinks.

There is a glow from the streetlamps across the road and flashes of headlights from the three a.m traffic, and they look like pool lights and laser sights, distorted by the glass of his window. John’s clothes still smell of chlorine and plastic explosives, and he wanted to burn them at first but he couldn’t stand the thought of wasting a perfectly serviceable set of clothing, so they lie in a pile by the foot of his bed, scenting his room with Semtex and fear.

 John gets up, closes his blinds, chucks his clothes in the laundry hamper, and goes to bed.

John can sleep, or at least he assumes he can, even though his bed feels like a coffin and his room feels like a warzone, even though he’d been kidnapped and knocked out and strapped to a bomb, even though he’d been aimed at by snipers and nearly blown up by his best friend. John is pretty certain that he can sleep, he’s slept through worse. He’s a soldier, he could sleep through a mortar bomb. He _has_ , actually. Multiple times.

John is exhausted, and he can sleep. He goes to bed, and doesn’t.

After all, there’s no rush.

John can sleep, but he lies awake instead, watches the night shadows dance across the not-beige ceiling. He strokes the soft duvet between his finger and thumb, breathes in the soft musky old-book scent of his bedroom, listens for the sounds of Sherlock’s pacing as he wears out the carpet in the living room downstairs. He hears the sloshing of cars speeding on the rain-slicked street, the rhythmic _thump-thump_ of rain falling on the roof above him, the rustle of the wind against the pipe over his window.

John lies awake, and feels.

He could have died. He _should_ have died. He knows this with all certainty. He and Sherlock made it, sure, but that was a stroke of luck that no one could have seen coming, least of all him. There had been no plan, no tricks. No way out, except for his gun and his flatmate’s aim. Sherlock had looked at him, in the end. Had asked, without saying a word, for John’s consent. To die.

 _Yes_ , John had said, without saying a word. Yes, he would die with him. He would still say it now, he knows. Now, safe in his room, in his bed, in his home, he would still say, _yes_.

So he lies awake, and feels and sees and smells and hears, and he catalogues each thing in his mind, because he doesn’t know when the last time he ever experiences these things will be. It should have been tonight, it _would_ have been tonight, but it wasn’t, and John isn’t the kind of man to let second chances slip by.  

He memorizes his room, the sights and sounds and smells and textures. He memorizes 221B at three in the morning, and the way he feels, safe and not-safe, under his covers in his home. He does this until he’s sure that if he were to die at any moment, he’d go out remembering. He doesn’t want to ever forget, wants to take this room and this flat and this life with him, wherever he goes, in this life or into the next.

John feels, and he remembers. And when he’s done, John sleeps, and for the first time in forever he doesn’t dream of a battlefield.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

He understands this completely.

The last time he’s ever felt anything like this, his consciousness bled into a single point, tiny and sharp, his vision spotted with white, his blood surging and filled with _something different_ , he’d had a needle in his arm. Repeatedly. It's not quite the same, though. The cocaine had made him feel like a diamond, strong and sharp and clear and beautiful. Right now, he feels like a plate of broken glass, sharp enough to slice and brilliant enough to blind if light strikes it in the right way, and ready to shatter at any moment.

He used to love this feeling, used to crave it, used to chase it. He doesn’t love it now. It leaves him gasping, reeling, at a loss.

Sherlock Holmes, at a loss. Somebody phone the papers.

Sherlock can’t sleep, he can hardly breathe. The case is over now, done, sorted. He’d solved them all, the puzzles, and it had been brilliant, so thrilling and so _fascinating_ , but now that it’s over the feelings hit him like a tidal wave. There’s the adrenaline, of course, and the satisfaction of a job well and cleverly done. But there’s also the anger, at Moriarty, at himself for letting him get away. The weariness, bone-deep and aching, of ignoring his body and pushing, pushing, pushing, past all his established limits and then even beyond. The disgust at having been led about by a madman, like some kind of dancing monkey, given puzzles and deadlines like he was some kind of _child_ , like a schoolboy taking his lessons.

And the guilt, that always comes last. If he gets a case soon enough, he won’t have to think about it, about all the little things that he missed and, sometimes, the people he failed. _This_ is why he needs cases, not the boredom, although he _does_ so hate the tedium of normal living. But the boredom isn’t just boredom, it means _thinking_. His brain never stops moving, and when it’s got nothing new to chew through it always goes back to these tiresome emotions, and then Sherlock feels it, the guilt and shame and disappointment in himself because he could have been faster, could have been cleverer, could have been _better_ , and he wasn’t.

The guilt always comes, if he doesn’t have something else to think about. Usually, it takes about a week. Tonight, though, it comes immediately, fast and sharp and strong, and it takes Sherlock’s breath away.

Sherlock stays awake, and feels.

So many things that he missed. That old lady, in her flat, blown to pieces because she said something and Sherlock couldn’t stop her. That little boy, who was seconds away from death, and that poor astronomy professor who actually did die, because Sherlock hadn’t listened to John and gone to look for her immediately, had gone running off all over London looking for something else entirely.

And John.

John, who had lost faith in him, who had thought that he didn’t care, who had seen him as a hero and been so bitterly disappointed. John, who he had sent running off on errands for Mycroft just to get them both out of the way. John, who he had snapped at and ignored and kept from sleeping, who deserved so much more than this life trailing after a man who needed him and forgot that he even existed.

John, who Sherlock had doubted and betrayed, even if it was only for a second. John, who would took on Jim Moriarty for him, who would have taken a bullet for him, who would have let him pull the trigger.

Sherlock can’t sleep. He lays awake in bed, then on the couch, then standing by the window, and feels.

 _I didn’t mean to fail you_ , Sherlock thinks, breathing hard. _I didn’t want to disappoint you. I didn’t want to hurt you, or scare you, or let you die for me. I don’t want you to die for me, or with me. I’m sorry._

Slowly, his vision clears, and his heartbeat slows, and his single point of focus spreads until it’s almost back to normal, and all Sherlock can feel is a soft ache in his chest and a tight knot of guilt in his gut. It’s better, truly. It is.

Sherlock still can’t sleep, but that’s alright. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve to, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really lucky that I managed to get this up today, actually. I was hoping to post two chapters a week, on the weekends, but I figured that'd probably be a long shot. Such is the life of an O-level student. *sighs*
> 
> But I had some free time today, so here's this week's second chapter. Hooray! :D


	5. Brilliance

John can sleep.

He doesn’t really feel like it.

He leaves Sherlock in the kitchen at around eleven, and retires earlier than he has in a while, mug in hand. He actually has a cup of tea tonight, which used to be commonplace but has now become an unspeakable luxury. The tea is warm and strong, and there is milk in it, actual _milk_ , even though with all the drama, he’d forgotten to do the shopping. Again.

John doesn’t know where the milk came from, actually, and that worries him more than it should worry any normal person, but probably not as much as it ought to worry _him_. He likes to think that Mrs Hudson had been a darling and brought it up for them, as she sometimes does. More likely, the recent fridge re-stock was Mycroft’s doing, which is an alarming thought best left, ignored, in the dark recesses of his brain.

John sips at his tea, huffs a kind-of laugh at the ceiling, warm liquid going slightly bitter in his mouth.

If John thinks about it properly, he hadn’t actually been around much in these past months. Okay, well, he’d been _around_ , in the strictest sense of the word, but what use had he been, really? He’d been useless, _worse_ than useless, used as leverage and as a tool and not for much else.

He is _unbelievable_ , he thinks. In the past six months, he has, among other things, nearly been shot by an annoyingly arrogant American, watched his best friend get doped out of his brain by a naked woman wearing his coat, let his best friend throw a now-less-arrogant but still-as-annoying American out of a window, left his best friend alone with a dangerous person long enough for them both to commit treason, and now lied to his best friend about said person’s death. On the orders of _Mycroft_.

And here he is, thinking about tea.

Hell.

John can sleep. Or he _could_ , if the tea would stop churning in his stomach. It’s making him feel sick.

He thinks of Sherlock, downstairs, and what he must be doing. He thinks of his flatmate, rushing around with his microscope slides at eleven-thirty at night. He thinks of his friend, of the lie he’d had to tell him, of the loss that he wasn’t even given the chance to grieve.

John can sleep, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to rush downstairs, send Sherlock to bed, make him a cup of tea with milk. He wants to tell him the truth, wants to hand him a slide with something disgusting on it, wants to run around at ungodly hours with an illegal firearm pressing into his back. John wants to get up, wants to _do_ something. He’s tired of being useless. He wants to be needed.

There’s a voice in his head, saying _What could I possibly need you for?_ , and John laughs again, because, _fair enough_.

John sips his tea, and it’s gone cold, and he gives up.

John can sleep. He sleeps, because there’s no reason not to.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

It’s not that bad, really. He’d almost forgotten how it felt to not sleep without an out of control buzzing in his brain, or guilt burning in his chest, or confusion making him indignant and angry. It’s pretty blissful. He’d played with his microscope until John went to bed, and he was alone, with his phone and his thoughts, and he’d needed it.

He still does.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and for once it’s not because he’s hurting or scared or restless. Sherlock can’t sleep, can’t turn off his mind or his emotions, and it’s _amazing_.

Sherlock stands by the window, and thinks, and smiles. It’s been a while. He watches the cars go by, a few lonely pedestrians straggling home after a long night, and for once he doesn’t read them, doesn’t even really see them. He doesn’t have to. He watches the cars, and the people, and looks up at the moon, and he knows, deep in his bones, that he has beaten them all.

It’s not about Irene, although of _course_ it’s about Irene. It’s all about her, because he wouldn’t have gone to save anyone else. He thinks about her for a bit, standing in the window, in the moonlight, and he misses her, too much to ignore and not enough to actually admit. She was beautiful, probably. Objectively. He doesn’t really have an opinion, one way or the other. But her _mind_ , her mind really was beautiful. Brilliant. Dazzling.

 _Is_ beautiful, Sherlock thinks, reminds himself, and his heart jumps a little in his chest.

Irene is alive, and it’s better than anything. She was astounding, _is_ astounding, but it’s not about her. It's not about her long black hair, wet upon his pillow, it’s not about the fifty-seven texts she sent him. It’s not about her measurements or her combat skills or how she tricked him, _him_ , Sherlock Holmes, the unbeatable man, and how she made even Mycroft sweat. It’s not even about the way she smiled when he came for her, or how quickly she could run when she wasn’t wearing heels.

Those things, those things are important, he supposes. Sherlock doesn’t like to think about them, doesn’t like them to matter, but his gut and his phone and his violin disagree. Still, it’s not about them.

It’s about winning, about beating the odds, about doing something impossible.

Sherlock hasn’t done an impossible thing in a long time.

Improbable things, yes. Many. He’s solved cases that other ( _idiots_ ) people had said were unsolvable, caught criminals that were supposedly uncatchable. He’s been _amazing_ , he’s been _astounding_ , but he hasn’t been _impossible_ in forever. He misses it.

He misses feeling invincible, he misses feeling powerful. He misses the days that go by afterwards, in a haze of giddy satisfaction, in the knowledge that everything had gone _right_ for once, that he had been right, all along. He misses the vindication, the elation, the feeling of flying.

He misses so many things. But he doesn’t have to miss them tonight.

Sherlock can’t sleep. He doesn’t have to.

Sometime in the night, his phone sighs, and it’s enough.


	6. Bastion

John can sleep.

He insists.

The wind is howling over the moor, a wild, eerie noise that makes him shiver, and the bed is too soft and too narrow and the room is unfamiliar, and even with his eyes closed John doesn’t feel at home. There’s something about the smell of it, the wild country air, that makes him feel vaguely uncomfortable, and the hallucinogenic still thrumming in his veins isn’t really helping.

The shadows on the wall still make him jump. He blames the drugs, and it helps, a bit.

John can sleep. His head hurts and he’s got gunpowder on his fingers and he’s sure to have nightmares tonight, in this foreign bed far from home, and maybe he’s going to be uneasy around big dogs for the next few months, but he can sleep.

He wants to, anyway. He _has_ to.

The room is dark, but it’s darker behind his eyelids, and John doesn’t want to spend all night staring up at a ceiling that’s sickeningly beige, that dances with dark, menacing shapes, but he doesn’t want to think, either. He doesn’t want to think about the hounds, or how weak they made him, how powerless. He doesn’t want to remember the horror of shooting, shooting, shooting at something real and not-real, of how he felt when he found out that the threat was all in his mind, relieved and indignant and ashamed of himself.

He doesn’t want to think about fear, not just the primal terror of the dogs, but also the desolation of watching Sherlock fall apart, the helplessness of huddling in a cage, just waiting, weaponless and terrified and alone.

He doesn’t want to think about betrayal, about _I don’t have friends_ , and he really doesn't want to wonder why he still felt so hollow, even after _I just have one_.

He doesn’t want to look, but he doesn’t want to think, and so he sleeps, so he won’t have to do either.

John can sleep, by force of will, but it’s hardly rest.

He wakes once in the night, hurt roiling in his gut and his mind alive with nightmares and his face covered in sweat, and the end of his bed is sagging, slightly. He opens his eyes, and there’s something large and dark sitting straight and alert near his feet, guarding him, watching him, eyes bright and worried and sorry.

John smiles slightly, feels safer, can’t help it.

He sleeps better after that.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

He refuses.

It’s not the hounds, although that’s part of it, he supposes. Sherlock’s not the kind of person who likes to admit defeat, and fear is as close to defeat as he’s willing to go. But he can’t deny facts, and so, yes, he is a little afraid of his mind, for tonight at least. He hates the irrationality of dreams, and he resents the terror that he feels, even now, that isn’t entirely due to the gas, and he isn’t exactly eager to let these two things combine. It's one reaction that he can (probably) live without seeing. But that’s not the reason, not really.

Sherlock can’t sleep. He’s got better things to do.

He sneaks John’s gun out from its drawer, and sits back down on his own bed, watching the window. It’s ridiculous, he knows, and Sherlock hates being ridiculous, but even though he knows that nothing is going to attack, that any threat to him or to John will exist only in their heads, that even if it _were_ real he is hardly going to be able to shoot it because he’s completely incompetent at shooting anything that isn’t a wall, he can’t put the gun down, can’t stop watching, can’t go to sleep.

Sherlock can’t sleep, because he is terrified.

He’s not afraid of any monstrous hound, not beyond the inevitable, instinctive fear. He’s not scared of death, or at least he doesn’t think he is. He’s not frightened of being wrong, not now, not at this moment, because he was _right_.

He’s not scared of anything, not for himself.

But John is there, next to him, and Sherlock almost can’t remember a time when he _wasn’t_ there, when he wasn’t around to fight, to protect, to sacrifice. Sherlock almost can’t remember being on his own, without his blogger, his protector, his friend, and it fills him with a horror that has nothing to do with any drug.

John is always there, and he always gets hurt, and Sherlock knows he can’t protect him. He can’t stop it, couldn’t stop John from killing for him, couldn’t stop John from nearly dying for him, once, twice, three times. He can’t protect John from Moriarty, or from the CIA, or from himself. He can’t trust himself not to use him, not to hurt him, not to say horrible things that cut more than he means them to. He can’t stop himself from throwing John into harm’s way, no matter how much it turns his stomach just to think about John in danger, hurt, afraid. He can’t trust himself to try.

He will try, anyway. He will try, at least for tonight.

Sherlock can’t protect John, but he wants to, so he sits up through the night with John’s gun, and then on John’s bed, and he watches and waits and guards, and he thinks, _never again, I’ll die first_.

Sherlock can’t sleep. He doesn’t dare.


	7. Breaking

John can sleep.

It doesn’t make a difference.

He lies in bed, head on the pillow, blanket tucked up to his shoulders, and he feels exactly the same as he did sitting on the couch an hour ago, as he did sipping bad tea in the Scotland Yard staffroom, as he did standing on a sidewalk with blood pooling around his feet.

He stares at the ceiling, and it’s pale blue but it might as well be beige, or black starry sky, or blood red. The room is dark, and yet it’s blinding, and everything hurts, and John still doesn’t feel anything but cold.

_Shock_ , the doctors had said, when they’d looked at him, and Mike had nodded and wrapped him in a bright orange blanket and John could have wept, at that moment, but then he _couldn’t_ , couldn’t move and couldn’t think and couldn’t cry, every muscle and every nerve shutting down. Lestrade had shaken his head and shoved a mug of tea into John’s hands, and he didn’t seem to mind that the police interview consisted of the two of them staring at each other in a stark white room, both solidly silent and most definitely not crying.

_Shock_ , the doctors had said, and John’s doctor mind agrees, but the rest of him knows better. John is not in shock. He isn’t in anything at all.

John doesn’t wonder if this is how it feels to die. He’s not that self-indulgent. He’s not the one that fell.

John can sleep. He knows it’s not going to change anything.

He sleeps for a while, and it doesn’t help. He sleeps, and dreams of sand blowing in the wind, of tall cliffs and dark water and blood. He dreams of weak tea and gingerbread and a madman’s smile, of crystallized carbon and PGPR. He dreams of chasing cabs and dodging buses and watching laser sights, of handcuffs over fences and falling, falling, falling.

John sleeps, and he wakes, and he sleeps again, and it’s all the same, and he wonders why he bothers, if it’s no escape, if the world inside his head is just the same as the one outside. But then this world is dark and flat and at least when he dreams he knows there’s always a chance that he’ll wake up. It’s no better there, but it isn’t real, and there’s really no reason be awake, to hang around.

He closes his eyes and lets himself fall.

John can sleep. It’s easier than breathing, at this point.

 

Sherlock can’t sleep.

It’s achingly familiar.

There’s blood on the wind and a glint in Jim’s eyes, and a gunshot, and everything ends. And Sherlock is left alone, again, standing on a roof in his home-from-home, and it’s so blindingly _unfair_ that for a moment he doesn’t think about fear, about falling, about snipers or Molly or contingency plans. For a moment, all Sherlock feels is rage, and it burns so much that for that moment, he is invincible.

Then John steps out of that cab, and Sherlock thinks, _no, no I’d die first_ , and he falls.

He’ll never admit it, but falling was the easy part.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and he doesn’t, not while he falls, not when he lands, not when he crumples and breaks and bleeds on the ground. He’s wide awake when John runs over and grabs his arm, when he’s heaved onto a stretcher, when Molly dresses his cuts and washes his coat and binds his head. He can’t sleep, and he feels everything, and everything hurts but there’s a spot on his left wrist, two finger-widths wide, that burns more fiercely than the rest.

He sits in the morgue in a bloodstained suit, and it feels almost perversely normal, and Molly takes his fingerprints and fills out forms and makes him a cup of tea and for once doesn’t correct him when he calls her _John_. She doesn’t have to. He looks up at her, and sees kind eyes that are the wrong sort of kind and mouse-brown hair that is the wrong kind of light and a petite frame that is the wrong kind of small, and he closes his mouth and doesn’t say anything for a while.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and it feels a bit like home, like moonlight through the windows in Baker Street, throwing the patterns of the wallpaper into sharp relief, like violin music at three in the morning, like creaking upstairs beds and midnight chases and illegal bullet holes in the walls. Sherlock can't sleep, and for a moment he closes his eyes and he can almost hear and see and smell it, his flat and his life and John, but it only lasts a moment, and then he’s back in the morgue and then in Molly’s little shoebox flat, and he’s alone and he’s dead and he still can’t sleep.

Sherlock can’t sleep, not even with a concussion, and for the first time in a long time he wishes he could, wishes enough it aches. Wishes he could disappear, could retreat, could hide inside his dreadfully sentimental subconscious and go back, to Baker Street, to John, to _before._

But he can’t sleep, and he can’t go back, and he can’t stop aching but he can refuse to show it. He watches the moonlight through Molly’s window and it’s close, but it’s different, the window too small and the moon at the wrong angle, and Molly is way too quiet in her bed upstairs and he owes her but he’ll never love her and he’ll never play for her when she can’t sleep, and she’ll never bring him tea with a wry smile, and this carpet will never be stained in just the right places and it’ll always smell too sweet, too clean. And he can’t stay here and even if he could it wouldn’t be home, but he bites his lip and pretends, and it’s harder than anything he’s ever done.

Sherlock can’t sleep, and it’s too much the same and no relief whatsoever, and relief is impossible and grief is ridiculous because he won, but this winning feels too much like losing and for once Sherlock doesn’t care about impossible or ridiculous. It hurts either way, and he doesn’t want to admit it but it does, it does, it does.

Sherlock can't sleep, and it’s like falling all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter hit me by surprise, actually. I wasn't actually planning to do a Reichenbach chapter, thought I'd go straight to the aftermath, but this one kind of grabbed me and tugged until I wrote it. I'm pleased with it, to say the least. :)
> 
> One more to go, guys! Thanks for reading! :)


	8. After

John can’t sleep.

It’s not his flat – well, _the_ flat. It isn’t his, could never be, it’s too far from chaos and warmth and 221B to ever be home. The flat is dreadful, tiny and completely lacking in character and not exactly clean. _Boring_ , says a voice in John’s head, and he winces and stares at the wall, which is covered in insipid pale yellow paper and conspicuously lacking in bullet holes. The carpet’s dirty, stained with coffee by the corner of the ugly orange sofa, and John knows that it hasn’t been cleaned in ages but he can’t tell how long, and he doesn't know why but every now and then he finds himself staring at the coffee stains and trying to guess.

There’s a faint chemical smell from the kitchen, and the fridge smells a little like rotting ears, and the first time John opened the doors he sank down on his heels and wept. He can’t put food in there, it’s unsanitary, and he’s got a bucket and a rag and a bottle of bleach parked on the floor under the kitchen counter, but he can’t bring himself to clean it.

John can’t sleep, and his new flat is abysmal and the ceiling above his bed is beige and the thought of waking up to it every morning makes him feel physically sick, but the flat isn’t the problem.

John can’t sleep, and he knows exactly why.

The knowing why bit hurts rather more than the not sleeping bit. John can live without sleeping, he’d actually prefer it, because his subconscious is cruel and weak and still grieving, and every time he sleeps he dreams of falling. He fears it more than anything else now, more than laser sights and Semtex vests and bullet wounds and sand, and he can live without dreaming of it, thank you very much. But he can’t sleep, and it doesn’t bother him, except the _why_ hurts, more than he’d like to admit.

John can’t sleep, because every time he lies in bed he can hear movement in the living room, in the kitchen, the tinkling of glass and the hissing of acid and the padding of feet. He can feel the _thump-thump_ of a restless body hopping on and off the couch, the pacing of a man at the window, can hear the huff of a sigh or the careless noisy scrape of a bow on metal strings, and sometimes even a snatch of music, a keening wail.

He can’t sleep, because in the dark the ceiling looks the same as it did at home back _before_ , the same as it did in the bedsit before that. He can’t sleep because whenever he makes tea he takes out two mugs and fills the kettle with too much water, and he usually never even notices until he’s got two cups of tea sitting on his bedside table, and he needs to leave the room. He can’t sleep because when he’s awake he hurts, and when tries to sleep he hurts, and it doesn’t seem to matter either way.

John can’t sleep, and it bothers him, more than it should.    

 

Sherlock can sleep.

He goes to bed once in a while, when he can, at dawn or at midnight or four in the morning, in grubby flats all over London, under a bridge in Moscow, in skips and on streets and in tiny but clean bedsits in New York, Dublin, Paris. Sherlock lies down when his body starts to fail him, and tapes up a cut above his eye or a bruise on his cheek, checks his coat for tears, eyes closed but ears straining for the whistle of a bullet, and knows that he can sleep.

He used to dream of doing this, this endless chase, this always-challenging case with the thousand fights and the hundred victories. It feels rather different from what he’d imagined.

Sherlock can sleep, and when he does he dreams of early dawn light on dusty throw pillows, of warmed mugs and ears in the breadbox, of domesticity and warmth. He dreams of dark city streets and blazing hearths and knives in the mantle instead of in his hand, of chasing instead of fleeing, of gunfire that’s only on his side. He dreams of home, and sometimes he stays, sips milkless tea in his leather-and-chrome armchair, breathes in the scent of chemicals and bread and old paper. Sometimes he stays, and watches the city from his window, and for a few hours he doesn’t miss home.

Sometimes he stays, and sometimes he wakes, heart pounding. _It was only a dream_ , he thinks, sometimes he feels loss and sometimes he just feels hollow, and sometimes he wants to step into the open and see if a bullet will end it all.

He never does, and he can’t tell if it’s because he’s strong or because he’s weak.

Sometimes, when he wakes, he runs his fingers over the barrel of his pistol, feels the smooth, cool metal under his thumb, tries to pretend that it’s smooth wood and metal strings and rosin. Sometimes he grips the handle of his blade, to clear his mind, to remind him of his purpose, and sometimes he slides his palm down over the blade and keeps it there, till all he feels is hate. Sometimes, he just lies, in bed or in the street, and closes his eyes and takes deep breaths until he feels almost calm, almost empty, and he counts down the names on his fingers and says thinks _just a few more. Just a few, then I can go home_.

What Sherlock never does is go back, because it would hurt too much. It doesn’t actually matter how he woke, if he has to run, if he has a new lead or an assailant or just too much sunshine in his eyes, it hurts just the same. Sherlock doesn’t go back, because it isn’t real, because he can’t stay, and it won’t make his list any shorter. So he waits, and he breathes, and he doesn’t sleep.

Sherlock can sleep, he knows. He just doesn’t try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks. :) Wow, my first multi-chapter fic! It's been quite a ride.
> 
> I've really loved writing this, and I hope you all loved reading it too. Thanks so much for your support. :)


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